>Hallo conlangers!
>
>On Saturday 19 January 2013 18:43:58 Gary Shannon wrote:
>
>> I believe that the opposite it true. We create words for things that
>> are important to us. It happens every day in the sciences, especially
>> biology and biochemistry. When some new organic compound becomes
>> important, instead of calling by it's chemical formula, a name is
>> created. The compound did not become important because it has a name,
>> it has a name because it became important.
>
>Yes. When something is important to us, we create a word. When
>something becomes very important to us, we create a shorter word.
>So a "carriage propelled by an engine built into it" became an
>"automobile" and later a "car".
>
>> But then, speaking as a non-linguist, I think Sapir-Whorf is a
>> questionable hypothesis. It really doesn't make a lot of sense to me,
>> because thought is non-verbal. When we "think in words", we are not
>> "thinking", we are reiterating what we have already thought without
>> words.
>
>I think you are correct.
>
>> If you don't believe that, next time you catch yourself "thinking"
>> with a sentence, stop yourself mid-sentence, and you will discover
>> that you DO know what the sentence was going to say, even though you
>> did not complete the mental uttering of the sentence.
>
>Right.
>
>> And you know
>> what the last word of the of the sentence was going to be long before
>> you silently repeated that word to yourself. The words of the sentence
>> were put together to repeat the thought to yourself, but the thought
>> existed before the words.
>
>And often you have a thought and are struggling for the right
>word for it. If thought was in a language, one could not think
>about what you don't know the word for. Also, as someone who
>masters two languages well to the point of being almost equally
>fluent in both, I sometimes remember a train of thought I have
>read somewhere, but do not remember in which language I read it!
>
>All this is evidence that language *reflects* thought rather than
>determining it.

I am Humboldtian in this respect: Language does not simply reflect
thought, but it completes thought. A thought is not finished until it has
been uttered and ideally been returned to you by the hearer. I am pretty
sure that with a bit of imagination, you can find similar "evidence" for the
Humboldtian view.